


The Dispossessed

by autiotalo (orphan_account)



Category: Die Ärzte
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-28
Updated: 2010-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 06:26:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/autiotalo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rod and Farin have more things that unite them than divide them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dispossessed

Turning thirty-one was some kind of watershed for him.

"I thought it would be different," he said, looking into his cup of tea as if it held the answers. It barely gave back his reflection, and the steam made him blink. "It was all pretend. A child's game. We talked about it often enough - how we'd be like pop stars - but it was all a joke."

"Some jokes stop being funny, though," I said.

"Yes."

I lit a cigarette, automatically moving it from one hand to the other so that the smoke wouldn't irritate him. It was entirely an unconscious gesture, but he noticed. Maybe he noticed every time I did it, but this was the first time he commented.

"You don't have to do that."

I stared at him, puzzled. "What?"

"Make allowances." He nodded towards the cigarette.

"I wasn't. I was just being polite." I put it between my lips and took a drag.

"You are, aren't you," he said, almost in wonderment. "I didn't expect this. That I would spend my thirty-first birthday with a polite Chilean. Funny how things turn out."

"Yes." I didn't know what I was supposed to say to this, so I just sat and smoked my cigarette. He watched me, but distantly, as if he didn't understand what I was doing; and it was an uncomfortable sensation. So to stop him, I said: "I always thought I'd be dead by the time I was twenty-one."

His gaze sharpened. He has a way of suddenly doing that, of snapping his attention away from whatever plane of existence he inhabits to focus in on something else. It happens all the time during interviews and is even more disconcerting on-camera than off. It took time to learn how to deal with this sudden razor-sharp stab of eye contact, and everything I'd learned failed me at that moment.

He leaned forwards, into the haze of cigarette smoke. "How did you stand it?"

I shrugged. "I was a child. Children have a certain resilience."

"They adapt." He smiled, and it was brief and twisted. "Or so they say."

I nodded vaguely and hoped he didn't notice how my fingers trembled as I took another drag. Children have a way of coping with the most horrific situations, but when they become adults, the consequences are laid out for them to see for themselves where they have come from and what they've become. They can trace the pathway of danger and desperation; they can see where their childish self lurched from one answer to the next, seeking to make order of the world around them. Things that made sense to the childish mind suddenly raise more questions than a parent, long ago, could ever hope to answer. Because by the time one becomes an adult, there are no more answers, just more questions.

"When I was six," he said quietly, "I had a new father. A new name. I hated it. And so I decided to run away. Maybe every child has this fantasy at least once. But I never stopped dreaming it."

I flicked ash at the floor. There was no ashtray, and I had never liked dropping the stuff into wineglasses. The floor was made of stone, and unlikely to be damaged. Instead the ash just drifted, smeared, merged with the twinkle of mica.

"I did the same thing," I told him, equally as quietly, "when we first came here. I went to the end of the street every day, wanting to go further, but… You know they say that, if you move house, you should rub butter on the paws of your cats? You should do the same with children."

He gave a soft snuffle, more empathy than amusement. "Children stray more than animals. They cover greater ground, even if the distance they travel isn't far."

I nodded, tucking the cigarette between my fingers as I combed at my fringe. A picky, self-conscious gesture: but then I wasn't in the habit of talking about my childhood. It had been easier to pretend back then, so that we would fit in. I've seen it in almost every displaced family: this desperation to be accepted so taut, so desired.

He watched me as I let my fingertips drift slow through the ends of my hair. The smoke hung above my head, a cloud of grey lost too soon. I could feel the heat of the embers as they glowed through the tobacco and paper, and so I brought my hand down again and flicked away the column of ash.

"Did you think you'd be sent back?" he asked, carefully.

"Yes." No need to think about that one. "But I wanted to go back. It wasn't like we all got away. How do you explain to a child that half of his family is on the other side of the world; that he might never see them again?"

"And in not seeing them, you think you'll forget them," he continued for me. "And then you feel guilty because you are the one who is free, yet you must carry them with you, just in case… Just in case you should wake one day and not remember who they are."

"Or who I am. Who I was."

We were silent for a while. I smoked my cigarette. He drank his tea. The room was cold around us, almost hollow, as if we'd both retreated into ourselves and left our shells upon the beach like flotsam.

He put the cup back into its saucer with enough force to sound the scrape of porcelain, and I shivered. Then he put his elbows on the table and leaned forwards, resting his chin on his folded hands, and stared at me.

"I am a selfish bastard," he said at length. "I wish I had half the honour of your six-year old self."

I finished my cigarette and stubbed it out on the heel of my shoe. "It's just survival," I said. "Nobody can blame you for that."

I held the dead cigarette butt between my fingers, curved inwards to my palm. I wasn't sure where to put it. Certainly I wasn't going to drop it on the floor.

He pushed forwards his cup and saucer. "There," he said; and so, with a startled glance towards him, I did as I was told.

He smiled slightly. "You don't always need to be polite, Rodrigo."

"No."

He reached out and touched me gently. "You have ash in your hair."

***

It was the fourth time we'd gone to bed together. He was still a mystery to me. He fucked like an animal, utterly without restraint. I'd never been with anybody who gave himself so completely. He had the ability to make each time like the first time, erasing every nuance of memory and acting without any kind of knowledge of consequence, forcing everything into the present tense. He took each orgasm as if it were his last, and in the moments afterwards he would be so silent and still that he seemed to be drained of life.

And when it was over, and I lay beside him marvelling at how different we were, he said softly: "I hate you for what you've made me."

On the edge of sleep, I dragged myself back, trying to understand. "What?"

"You're the one that holds us together," he said. "You're the one he went to. You say nothing, but you're the one that knows the most. And so I… I am the villain. The odd-one-out. "

"That's not true," I protested.

He looked like an effigy: cold, unmoving. Blue-veined marble, grey-tinted by the light, limbs twisted in desolate repose, the sheet crushed tight across his thighs. His gaze was fixed on the ceiling, and for a waxen moment I was reminded not so much of a sculpture but of a corpse.

"It is so," he said. "You and he get drunk, and smoke, and do stuff, and I just sit and watch it happen. We were perfect opposites, he and I. But now there's you, and one becomes two, and three's always a crowd."

"Bela adores you," I said.

"Yes. But still I sent him into exile."

I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees. "He came back."

"I asked him to, and he was so kind -"

"It's not kindness!" I interrupted him, annoyed.

He closed his eyes as if pained by my vehemence, and shook his head a little in denial. When he fell into stillness again, he asked, "Would you go back?"

"To Chile? Yes. Yes, of course I would," I said.

"Even though it won't be as you remember? That everything will have changed so much? That you now carry another cultural identity?"

"It's my home." I touched him, traced the line of his ribs and the hollow of his hip. Still he didn't move, although his skin flinched from the caress. "My first home, the home of my heart."

"You could reconcile the differences?" he asked, and he sounded surprised.

"I would try."

He lay silent for a while and let me touch him, as if he were convincing himself that he could bear the weight of my hand. There is a hypnotic quality in stroking an object so utterly unresponsive. I could have done something to make him respond, but I knew he wouldn't like it. I was brought up to respect limits, even as we crossed boundaries.

"I wish I had had your honour at six years' old," he said again. "And I wish I had your optimism now."

I smiled. "It's not optimism. It's survival, remember?"

He looked at me then, finally lifting a hand to close around my wrist to stop me from touching him. "Why do we do this?"

I shrugged, wriggling my hand from his grasp. "Because it feels good," I said. I lay down again and put my arm around him, even though I knew he hated it.

"Because it feels like exile," he corrected me. "Because it reminds us that this is not home." He tried to inch away, but the sheet, wrapped tight, trapped him.

"An exile can find happiness far from home," I said, pressing closer.

For he moment he resisted, drawing in his breath as if he would snap in anger, his body tensed against mine. And then perhaps some of what I'd said made sense to him, and gradually he surrendered to my clumsy embrace, as pliable as a dream.

"You don't have to make allowances," he said, only slightly amused.

"I wasn't," I said with a yawn. "And I'm not being polite, either."


End file.
